Athena
A hub for productivity and note taking.
Role
UX Designer and Researcher
Approach
Goal Directed Design (GDD)
Team
Christine Taylor, Hannah Hereth, Jade Bohanan, Madelyn Grimes
Overview
Our team used Alan Cooper's Goal Directed design approach to create a mobile prototype for young adults to help organize their lives through our productivity and note-taking app. Below you can see the phases of the GDD method we used to focus on and understand our user's goals.
Timeline
January - April 2023
Research Phase
Kickoff Meeting
The kickoff meeting is where we would usually meet with stakeholders to discuss the logistics of the app but because this project was for an Interaction Design 1 class, we met on Discord and ask ourselves questions like:
Who is the user?
Where does our product fit in their work or life?
How will we make money?
This helped us to think from a stakeholder's perspective as a team to ask questions that we would experience in the workplace.
Literature Review
In this part of the GDD we collected information on the industry, domain, relevance, ect. This allowed us to gain a better understanding of our theoretical 'users' and 'market' that we were designing for. This process also facilitated us to have a better research report. We found that:
Between 80 and 95 percent of college students procrastinate.
Students who believe they have control of their time perform better on assignments and had less stress.
Competitive Audit
Online media forms have surpassed physical forms and it will only continue to progress in this direction. Conducting a competitive audit helped us better understand what apps and interfaces were already out there. We discovered the positives and shortcomings of each of these apps to better understand where we could create the best user experience. As a group we reviewed Notion, Evernote, OneNote, and Trello. We found that many of the apps did not span across all aspects of productivity that we wanted to cover.
Stakeholder Interviews
At this point in the process, we would have a second meeting with stakeholders to go over what we found as a team and how that will affect the projection of the app. Again, since we did not have stakeholders and we moved onto the next phase.
User Interviews
User interviews are one of the most important processes in GDD because it gives us real world responses on what to do and what not to do when designing our interface. We were able to interview five subjects for our app. We asked a long list of questions about their lifestyles, study habits, preferences, and more. Our interviewees were ages between 18-22 and four of them were enrolled in a four-year college program and one in nursing school. we conducted four interviews remotely and one in person.
Modeling Phase
Personas
Our main persona was a representation of interviewees 1, 2, and 4 who were more disorganized and less productive than our secondary persona. The secondary persona represented participants number 3 and 5 who were more organized and could still utilize our app without inhibiting either parties. By developing these personas, we were better able to design with these ‘people’ in mind.
Requirements Phase
Requirements
From our personas- mainly our primary persona- we took the most important end goals and life goals and turned them into requirements for our interface.
Wireframe
From our requirements we made key path scenarios after we created a context scenario. A context scenario we created a day in the life process that the persona would have with our app. Because we wrote these scenarios out it helped us think in terms of our personas and not guess what they would want to do from our perspectives.
Refinement
Usability Testing
I learned that usability testing is very important because we learned how we can improve our prototypes for a better experience. One interviewee felt as if the home page did not look or feel like a home page and so we added a welcome back message at the top of the page. Both users did not know how to expand the notes or understand how to see all of the notes and so we added view all buttons at the end of the horizontal scrolling. We had enough time to add customization to the folders as well because that was really emphasized in our initial interviews. Also, to make the design more cohesive we changed the private section to have cards like the two sections above to make everything more intuitive.
Conclusion
Overall, I had such a great experience throughout this process. I really enjoyed my team and our problem that we were trying to solve. I learned that user research and speaking to different kinds of people is very important. It can be difficult to design for your user and not for yourself. Also, feedback and consistent revising is essential when creating something for the user’s needs.
If we had more time I would have liked to have done:
A notifications page because that was very prominent in our interviews
More usability testing
Added more customization such as themes or a dark mode